Doc or Not, Catfish Is Stranger Than Fiction

What is Catfish? That question is an implicit part of the film's marketing campaign, which, with the tagline, "Don't let anyone tell you what it is," teases a big reveal. The answer depends on whom you ask.

Opening this week and shot on-the-fly by Ariel "Rel" Schulman and Henry Joost, the film chronicles an online relationship that develops between Rel's brother, charismatic twentysomething New York photographer Nev, and a family in Michigan, who, the filmmakers discover mid-filming, aren't who they purport to be. When Catfish premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in January, the festival's program guide classified it as a documentary.

But a certain segment of the audience—hip to the current trend in quasi-nonfiction (see: Exit Through the Gift Shop, I'm Still Here), wise to the ways of the Web, and wary of being conned—wasn't buying the festival and the filmmakers' assurances that this was not a work of fiction. After the first screening, documentary superstar Morgan Spurlock allegedly approached a member of Team Catfish and said, "That is the best fake documentary I've ever seen." By the final Sundance screening, when a civilian audience member commented during the Q&A that he suspected the film was "really a faux-documentary," the filmmakers were on the defensive. "Oh, so you're saying that my brother is the best actor in the world? And we're the best writers in Hollywood?" responded Rel, with no small hint of annoyed sarcasm. "Thank you!" That was the end of that Q&A.

Catfish's directors, their main subject, and others close to the film insist that nothing in the final cut was fabricated, staged, or re-created. "The reason why some people have said parts of the movie are not real," Henry says, "is because it's told in a way that you're not used to documentaries being told—in real-time."

Catfish has no narration and no traditional interviews. Instead, Henry and Rel make ingenious use of the technologies on which Nev's relationships were based—Facebook, YouTube, Google Maps, Gchat—to introduce the characters and provide the bulk of the story's exposition. "We actually went down that [other] road—we shot talking heads, we had voiceover narration at one point," Henry says. "And then we showed it to some filmmaker friends, and they said, 'Guys, you have the footage to edit this thing like a narrative.' That was a huge revelation for us—that we could edit it exactly the way it unfolded in real life."

One of those filmmaker friends was Andrew Jarecki, director of Capturing the Friedmans—another controversial documentary sensation that started as one type of film and became another. "I think the percentage of people that really believe you could make this up is pretty small," says Jarecki, who started working with Henry and Rel in post-production and is credited as an executive producer on the film. "Once you meet the boys, you realize that this is not Banksy—these boys are not the kind of guys that want to make some kind of PR sensation or trick the public."

My experience talking to "the boys" fits with Jarecki's description. They did not strike me as calculating or cynical enough to formulate a major media hoax. I believe them; I also believe that their film's non-fiction status has little to do with why it resonates.

The story of Catfish started in December 2007. Nev, Rel, and Henry were photographers/videographers sharing an office in Manhattan. Nev's photograph of a dance performance had been published in the New York Sun, and one day in December 2007, he received a package with a Michigan postmark containing an impressionistic painting of the photo, with a letter explaining that the painting was the work of a prodigiously talented little girl named Abby. Abby and Nev started up an e-mail friendship, which soon involved Abby's mother, Angela. Nev became Facebook friends with both, and then with Abby's dad, her brother, and a host of their friends and family members, all of whom seemed to be part of a low-key artists' community.

Henry and Rel started casually filming Nev's interactions with this family. "We just thought it was interesting that he was getting into this group of artists," Henry says, "and we thought maybe it would be a nice short film about a photographer mentoring a young painter, and a young painter inspiring a photographer.

"And then Megan entered the picture, and it became a love story."

Two months after Abby initiated contact with Nev, he got an e-mail from Abby's half-sister—a gorgeous, coquettish, but apparently virginal 19-year-old model/dancer named Megan. Over the next six months, Megan and Nev built a friendship—e-mailing, Facebooking, texting, and talking on the phone. Though the two hadn't met, their bond became intimate.

"She started e-mailing me these photos," Nev recalls. "They were very provocative. And she'd be like, 'I just did this photo shoot. What do you think?' And of course, I, uh, approved of the work. And that's when I was like, 'Oh, my God, this girl is really coming on to me.' "

Once Megan and Nev's relationship took a turn for the romantic, Rel says, "We definitely increased how much we filmed him." That the prospect of a sexual relationship motivated an intensity of interest for both the person inside the relationship and the outside observers says more about what Catfish captures of contemporary life than anything having to do with the film's big reveal. (Let's just say that something happens that forces Nev to question everything he thought he knew about Megan.)

One of the big sticking points for Catfish skeptics is that Nev waited as long as he did (eight months in real-time, represented by the first half of the movie) to do the climactic spelunking that causes Megan's story to fall apart. He doesn't really have a solid rebuttal. When asked if he had ever Googled Megan before the detective session we see onscreen, Nev says, "No. Well, if I did, it didn't turn up anything, so I moved on."

"You have to realize that they started out without any suspicions that things were different than they seemed," defends executive producer Jarecki. "So [to say], 'They should have done this, they should have done that'—well, yeah, with hindsight, I guess you might have done things differently. And, obviously, a documentary chooses its moments, and chooses when to reveal information."

The "What is Catfish?" question gets more complicated when talking to Ryan Kavanaugh, the charismatic producer whose Relativity Media purchased Catfish and is releasing the film through their Rogue Pictures label, under the auspices of Universal Studios. "I think the film is 100 percent a 'documentary,' " Kavanaugh says, calling from vacation in Hawaii, his scare quotes audible over the phone. That said, "You don't want to call it a 'documentary' because it doesn't really do it justice. The term 'documentary' carries kind of a weird, artsy, negative connotation with it."

Kavanaugh and his crew instead decided to brand Catfish a "reality thriller," which is problematic: "Reality" calls to mind reality TV, which these days is all but openly acknowledged to involve at least some degree of staging and manipulation, right? Kavanaugh says that's not the kind of "reality" he's talking about. "The best analogy I can give is, say you were taking a picture of a couple on the beach and as you're developing the photo, you realize that there is a murder happening in a boat behind the couple."

Rogue/Universal seem intent on scrubbing Catfish of its indie doc roots. They held the film back from the festival circuit after Sundance, and have an aggressive release strategy. A special effort has been made to avoid booking Catfish in traditional art houses. It's a gamble built on the assumption that the masses who live their lives online will: 1) be receptive to a film that not only mirrors their behavior but warns against it, and 2) spread box-office-boosting word-of-mouth.

If Catfish is, as Henry put it, a "cautionary tale" about how easy it is to construct false realities in a techno-communicative culture—essentially a wagging finger warning us to be careful about talking to strangers—then that's the most boring thing about it. Nev was sucked into these relationships because they stroked his artistic ego as well as his libido. They gave him what everyone wants: attention, flattery, acceptance, confidence—all without requiring him to do much real-life work. Whether you think Catfish is fact or fiction, it certainly taps into something true: the basic, common need to believe that what feels like love is real.